| HUM 270 |
"Rethinking
Bodies" |
Elizabeth
Grosz |
This course is an introduction
to various theoretical and cultural accounts of the body.
The concept of the body is generally relegated to a secondary
or subordinate category relative to the privilege of mind
or Reason in the history of Western thought. This course
will examine the work of a number of theorists who have
questioned and problematized the subordination of body to
mind (Freud and Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Foucault,
Deleuze, Irigaray and Kristeva). It is divided into four
parts: the first is an introduction and selective survey
of the ways in which the body (and mind) have been formulated
in modern Western thought. The second part focuses on phenomenological
and psychoanalytic conceptions of the lived body, the body
of experience or the corporeal schema. The third part examines
the body as a (writing) surface, a surface of social inscription,
marking, and training. The fourth and final part explores
the implications of acknowledging the sexual specificity
of the body for notions of knowledge and representation.
